In a culture increasingly reliant on Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging to communicate, connect, and reconnect, I have chosen embroidery, a slow-paced, time-consuming craft, as my primary medium. I hand-stitch text and illustrations documenting my search for personal and professional fulfillment as a single woman living in Brooklyn. I call this project “Were I So Besotted,” and think of my collective embroideries as a blog. I maintain an actual web log, wereisobesotted.blogspot.com, to contextualize my embroideries within digital culture.

My pieces range in size from 2×2.5” to 3.5×3.5’. I call my smallest, purely textual embroideries “post-it notes” or “embroidered tweets.” These contain excerpts of conversations I overhear and participate in, and stream-of-consciousness musings about dating in the digital age. Examples of stitched phrases include “Help me take the ‘ex’ out of sex,” and “I want our first kiss to go on and on like a poem that’s still being written.”

In my larger scale pieces, I juxtapose text and images on the same piece of fabric. I most often embroider on antique textiles with lace borders and existing decorative embroidery. Small stains and tiny holes adorn the fabric; sometimes, I use existing lace borders to “frame” my embroidery.

I first began this project in 2007 during the height of my own internet dating. Some of the issues I grappled with then, including how to set boundaries between public and private behavior and expression, continue to fascinate me. “Were I So Besotted” began as an experiment and has become a means for me to navigate a digitally-induced social culture in which I still feel like a foreigner, despite my own continued participation.